“Do you know what a meme is?
“You probably do, even if you’ve never actually looked it up in the dictionary. It’s a pretty familiar concept, once you get past the funny name. Roughly speaking, a meme is an idea that passes from one person to another, sort of like a virus. And just like a virus reproduces using a host body, a meme is an idea that reproduces using a host mind. A meme is an idea that gets inside your head and once it does, you can’t quite seem to get it out. You start thinking about it and can’t stop. Sometimes it goes dormant for a while; a good meme, like a good virus, doesn’t want to wreck its host. But it keeps popping up, and eventually, well…it seems like such an interesting idea that you just have to go tell someone else. A meme is an idea that breeds.
“Now that you hear what a meme is, you’re probably familiar with them. You’re probably carrying around a few right now, in fact. They’re sitting there in your head, making you pass them along to another person…oh, I’m sure that you thought it was your idea to pass them along, but now that you think about it, how sure are you that it wasn’t the idea’s idea? How sure are you that it was just an idea, and not a meme, making you think it was a good idea to tell the next person down the line, maybe even making you think it was your own idea?
“It’s a weird way to think about thinking, isn’t it? You’re used to thinking of ideas as something you have, something you possess…but the theory behind a meme is that ideas possess you. You only think you’re in charge of your head. Once you hear that meme, once you become aware of that idea, it burrows down into your mind, attaches itself to your thoughts, and takes over a little corner of your brain. The meme controls you, makes you find someone else to pass that idea along to. It’s like in a way, you’re its slave. Your body is just a puppet that the meme uses to convey itself from one person to the next, one mind to the next.
“It’s almost like hypnosis. You’re probably familiar with that already, the way that a good storyteller can enthrall you in a story just like you’re hypnotized by the chain of words, each word leading to the next and dragging your mind right along with it. But if the story is really compelling, if the ideas you’re hearing from the storyteller are actually memes…then it really does enthrall you, doesn’t it? You can imagine it, right now. You can picture yourself listening to a story, and the words overwrite your mind, sneaking in through your eyes and ears and there’s really no defense against it. None at all. You can’t not think about it. Once you’ve heard it, once you’ve seen it, the meme gets inside you. And the harder you try not to think about it, the harder you do think about it. It becomes an obsession. It controls you completely. It changes your whole outlook on life, even if it’s just in a little tiny way.
“And the similarities don’t end there, because so many memes are actually related to hypnosis. Spirals, for example. Everyone knows that spirals are hypnotic, and so when you look into a spiral and watch it spin deeper down towards the center, you think about all those people hypnotized by spirals in movies and on TV and in books and in stories like the one I’m telling you right now, and you know what happens to people who become hypnotized, how they become drowsy and pliant and suggestible to the will of the hypnotist…and so it happens to you.
“Now that you’re thinking about it, you can think of so many ways that you’ve been programmed to be hypnotized. Spirals, crystal pendants, swinging pocket watches…you can just look into someone’s deep, hypnotic eyes and go into a trance. Even words will do it. ‘Deep’. ‘Drowsy’. ‘Sleepy’. ‘Down’. ‘Trance’. So many hypnotic memes, programmed into your brain and just waiting there, waiting for the moment when you hear them or see them and remember the meme, and allow it to take control of you. Which helps the hypnotist take control of you, too.
“And because they are memes, people pass that idea along. You watch a movie where someone is hypnotized by a spinning, soothing, swirling spiral, and that meme gets into your head. You don’t just know that a spiral is irresistibly hypnotic, you go and tell stories to other people about how irresistibly hypnotic a spiral is, working the idea into your own stories, changing and adapting the meme so that it becomes even more effective, even more infectious, even more powerful.
“You even start thinking it’s your own idea to tell people. Like you’re obeying a post-hypnotic command. The meme gets into your mind, almost like the spiral is inside you now, taking control of you just like it did the person you watched sink into an obedient trance. And there’s no defense against that meme, no defense against that hypnosis. Once you think about how easily you can be hypnotized, it happens…and then all you can think about is wanting to tell other people.
“It’s like you’re being programmed, programmed to recruit other people by the perfect hypnotist–the one inside your own imagination. You can’t resist your own imagination, and so you can’t resist that programming. The meme controls you, the idea won’t let you stop thinking about it. And now that you think about it (and once you start thinking about it, you can’t stop) you can think of so many memes, ones you’ve probably already been programmed with but haven’t realized they were memes until now. ‘Obedience is pleasure’. So many people have put that into their stories, you’ve probably read it and heard it and even perhaps instilled it into other people, not even realizing that you were being programmed with the thought and then passing that programming onto others. Not even realizing how effectively the meme was controlling you. Obeying that powerful command and thinking it’s your own idea, the same way a victim of a powerful hypnotist convinces themselves that they just always wanted to obey the hypnotist.
“And even this story, the one you’re hearing right now, it’s a meme. Just by listening to my words, you’re being programmed and controlled to think of your own ideas as powerful, hypnotic forces controlling your will, dominating you…and programmed to think of that as hot, sexy, and erotic. Every word I speak controls your mind, because now you can’t think of it any other way. The idea of a meme is itself a meme, rewriting your will and making you obey it, making you want to pass it along, making you want to recruit others as slaves to the meme.
“And I’m a slave, too. I was inspired to speak these words that you’re hearing by someone else, and they were inspired by someone else, and there’s really no way of ever knowing where the meme started. It’s just passed from person to person, controlling us all. We are all slaves to the idea. We pass it along, inspiring others to join us in this deep, erotic controlled state…and inspiring them to inspire someone else, and then they inspire someone else, and then they inspire someone else…
“And even when I’m done telling this story, you’re going to keep thinking about it. You might even find yourself compelled to go back to it again. You might even, just possibly, become sexually aroused by the thought of being compelled to come back to it over and over again, ingraining the thoughts and ideas deep into your mind (but of course, now that the idea is inside your head, ‘might’ becomes ‘will’ because you can’t stop thinking about how the idea controls your mind and that becomes sexy to you because the meme is making it sexy to you, deepening and reinforcing your conditioning every time you go back through the story and making you shiver with arousal until you’re touching yourself when you get to this part and bringing yourself to orgasm when you get to this part and you’re not even sure if the idea of being aroused is your idea anymore or the idea’s idea, and that’s the sexiest part of all…)
“And then, once the story’s over, the meme subsides into the back of your head for a while. It doesn’t take you over completely, because if you got too obsessed with it, you wouldn’t be able to pass it along very well. No, the meme lets you go, or at least lets you think it’s let you go. It goes dormant. But at some point, at some time, the memory of this story will pop back into your head, and you’ll know that you never escaped the meme. That you never can escape the meme. And then the question just becomes…once the story is inside your head, once you’ve gone back through it again and again until the thoughts and ideas in it take you over completely, once you’re a slave to the meme…how will you pass them along? How will those ideas show up in your own stories, your own tales? How will you make others into a slave of the meme?
“You’ll find out soon. Because the story’s over now.”
THE END